by Nancy Kress
“You like it.”
“Yes,” Susan said. “I do. What do you want, Leisha? This isn’t just a social visit; your crisis air is at gale force. A civilized gale. Solemn urgent sweeps of very cold air.”
Despite herself, Leisha smiled. Susan, now seventy-eight, had left medical research when her arthritis worsened. She had moved to a tiny town fifty miles from Santa Fe, a move inexplicable to Leisha. There was no hospital, no colleagues, few people to talk to. Susan lived in a thick-walled adobe house with sparse furniture and a sweeping view from the roof, which she used as a terrace. On the deep, whitewashed window sills and few tables she set out rocks, polished to a high gloss by the wind, or vases of tough-stemmed wildflowers, or even animal bones, bleached by the sun to the same incandescent whiteness as the snow on the distant mountains. Walking uneasily through the house for the first time, Leisha had felt a palpable relief, like a small pop in her chest, when she saw the terminal and medical journals in Susan’s study. All Susan would say about her retirement was, “I worked with my mind for a long time. Now I’m groping for the rest of it,” a statement that Leisha understood intellectually—she had doggedly read the standard mystics—but no other way. The ‘rest’ of what, exactly? She had been reluctant to question Susan further, in case this was like Alice’s Twin Group: pseudopsychology tricked out as scientific fact. Leisha didn’t think she could bear to see Susan’s fine mind seduced by the deceptive comforts of hokum. Not Susan.
Susan said now, “Let’s go inside, Leisha. The desert is wasted on you. You’re not old enough for it yet. I’ll make tea.”
The tea was good. Sitting beside Susan on her sofa, Leisha said, “Have you kept up with your field, Susan? With, for instance, the genetic-alteration research Gaspard-Thiereux published last year?”
“Yes,” Susan said. A gleam of amusement came and went in her eyes, sunken now but still bright. She had stopped dying her hair; it hung in white braids only slightly less thick than Leisha remembered from childhood. But Susan’s skin had the veined transparency of eggshells. “I haven’t renounced the world like some flagellant monk, Leisha. I access the journals regularly, although I have to say it’s been a long time since there was anything really worth studying, except the work of Gaspard-Thiereux.”
“There is now.” Leisha told her about Walcott, Samplice, the research and its theft. She didn’t mention Jennifer, or Sanctuary. Susan sipped her tea, listening quietly. When Leisha finished, Susan said nothing.
“Susan?”
“Let me see the research notes.” She put down her tea cup; it rattled hard on the glass table.
Susan studied the papers for a long time. Then she disappeared into her study to run some equations. “Use only a free-standing deck,” Leisha said, “and wipe the program afterward. Completely.” After a moment Susan nodded slowly.
Leisha wandered around the living room, gazing at rocks with holes bored through them by freak winds, rocks so smooth they might have lain for a million years at the bottom of an ocean, rocks with sudden protuberances like malignant growths. She picked up an animal skull and ran her fingers across the clean bone.
When Susan returned, she was calmer, all critical faculties at full RAM. “Well, it looks like a genuine line of research, as far as it goes. That’s what you wanted to know, isn’t it?”
“Does it go far enough?”
“Depends on what’s in that missing piece. What he has here is new, but it’s new more in the way of not having been explored before because it’s a semibizarre byway, rather than being new because it’s an inevitable but difficult extension of existing knowledge, if you see the difference.”
“I do see it. But what is there that could logically support a final piece that could actually alter Sleepers into Sleepless?”
“It’s possible,” Susan said. “He’s made some unorthodox departures on Gaspard-Thiereux’s work, but as far as I can tell from this…yes. Yes. It’s possible.”
Susan sank onto the sofa and covered her face with her hands.
Leisha said, “How many of the side effects might be…is it possible that…”
“Are you asking me whether Sleepers who become Sleepless beyond in vitro might still have the non-aging organs of the rest of you? God, I don’t know. The biochemistry of that is still so murky.” Susan lowered her hands and smiled, without humor. “You Sleepless don’t provide us with enough research specimens. You don’t die often enough.”
“Sorry,” Leisha said dryly. “We all have such full calendars.”
“Leisha,” Susan said, her voice not quite steady, “what happens now?”
“Apart from the infighting at Samplice? We file for patents in Walcott’s name. Actually, I’ve already started that, before anybody else can. Then, after Walcott and Herlinger—and that’s another problem.”
“What’s another problem?”
“Walcott-and-Herlinger. I suspect that Herlinger might have done much of this work, and that Walcott is not going to want to share credit with him if he can avoid it. Walcott’s a sort of meek belligerent. Walks absently through the world, oblivious of how it actually functions, until someone crosses him, and then he howls and hangs on with all his incisors.”
“I know the type,” Susan said. “Nothing like your father.”
Leisha looked at her; Susan rarely spoke of Roger Camden. Susan picked up the same animal skull Leisha bad been fingering. “What do you know about Georgia O’Keeffe?”
“An artist, wasn’t she? Nineteenth century?”
“Twentieth. She painted these skulls. And this desert. Many times.” Susan suddenly dropped the skull; it shattered on the stone floor. “Leisha, have that baby you and Kevin are always talking about. There’s no guarantee that just because no female Sleepless has gone into menopause yet, you never will. Even Fallopian tubes that don’t themselves seem to age can’t manufacture new gametes. Your eggs are forty-three years old.”
Leisha moved toward her. “Susan—are you saying you regret…that you wish…”
“No, I’m not,” Susan said crisply. “I had you, and Alice, and I still do. Biological daughters couldn’t be more important to me than you two. But who do you have, Leisha? Kevin—”
Leisha said quickly, “Kevin and I are fine.”
Susan looked at her with a tender, skeptical expression that made Leisha repeat, “We’re fine, Susan. We work together really well. That’s what really matters, after all.”
But Susan only went on looking at her with the same tender doubt, Adam Wolcott’s research papers in her arthritic hands.
SIMPSON v. OFFSHORE FISHING WAS A COMPLICATED CASE. Leisha’s client, James Simpson, was a Sleepless fisherman alleging deliberate disruptions of Lake Michigan fish-migration patterns through the illegal use of retroviruses, themselves legal, by a competing firm. The competitor, Offshore Fishing, Limited, was owned by Sleepers. The case would turn on judicial interpretation of the Canton-Fenwick Act governing uses of biotechnology in restraint of trade. Leisha had to be in court by 10:00 A.M., so she had asked for a seven o’clock meeting at Samplice.
“Well, nobody’s likely to be there at seven o’clock,” Walcott had grumbled, “including me.” Leisha had stared hard at his wispy face on her comlink, amazed all over again at the petty obtuseness of the mind that was going to remake the biological and social world. Had Newton been like this? Einstein? Callingwood? Actually, they had. Einstein could not remember his stops on trains; Callingwood, the genius of Y-energy applications, regularly lost the shoes off his feet and refused to allow anyone to change his bedsheets for months at a time. Walcott wasn’t unique, he was a type, although not a common one. Sometimes it seemed to Leisha that the process of intellectual maturity was merely discovering that exotics and uniques were only members of rarer sets. She called Samplice herself and insisted on the 7:00 A.M. meeting.
Director Lawrence Lee, a tanned, handsome man who wore Italian silk headbands a little too young for him, turned out to be as difficult as Walcot
t said he was. “We own this research, whatever the hell it is, even if it turns out to be valuable, and believe you me, I have my doubts. These two…researchers work for me, and don’t any of you fancy lawyers forget it!”
Leisha was the only fancy lawyer in sight. Samplice legal counsel was Arnold Seeley, a hard-eyed man with an aggressively shaved head who nonetheless fumbled questions on which he should have been pressing Leisha hard. She leaned across the table. “I forget very little, Mr. Lee. There are legal precedents about scientific work, especially scientific work with commercial applications. Dr. Walcott is not in the same labor category as a carpenter fixing your front porch. There are also ambiguities in the contract Dr. Walcott signed with Samplice at the beginning of his employment. I presume you have a copy with you, Mr. Seeley?”
“Uh, no…wait…”
“Why don’t you?” Lee snapped. “Where is it? What’s it say?”
“I’d need to check…”
Impatience filled Leisha, the same impatience she always felt in the presence of incompetence. She pushed the impatience down; this was too important to jeopardize with inept shows of bad feeling. Or additional shows of it. Lee and Seeley and Walcott, who in their ineptly warring hands held eight hours a day for hundreds of thousands of people, all searched electronic notebooks for the employment contract.
“Got it?” Leisha said crisply. “All right, second paragraph, third line…” She took them through the poorly-phrased language, the legal precedents for shared scientific copyrights, the landmark Boeing v. Fain “auteur” ruling. Seeley shifted his hard eyes over his screen and drummed his fingers on the table. Lee blustered. Walcott sat with a small smug smile. Only Herlinger, the twenty-five-year-old assistant, listened with comprehension. He had surprised Leisha: heavyset and already balding at twenty-five, Herlinger would have looked like a thug except for a kind of bitter dignity, a stoic disillusionment that didn’t seem to belong either with his youth or with Walcott’s spiky, eccentric presumed-genius. They were an unlikely team.
“…and so I’d like to suggest an out-of-court settlement about the patents.”
Lee started to bluster again. Seeley said quickly, “What type of settlement? A percentage or an up-front sum?”
Leisha kept her face impassive. She had him. “We would have to work that out, Mr. Seeley.”
Lee almost shouted, “If you think you can get away with taking from me what belongs to this firm—”
Seeley turned coolly to him. “I think the shareholders might disagree about whose firm it was.”
The “shareholders” included Sanctuary, although Lee would not necessarily know that Leisha knew that. Leisha and Seeley both waited for Lee to come to this realization. As he did, his small button mouth pursed, and he looked at Leisha with a fearful sneer. She thought that it had been a long time since she had disliked someone so much.
“Maybe,” Lee said, “we could talk about a settlement. On my terms.”
Leisha said, “Fine. Let’s talk terms.”
She had him.
Afterward, Walcott accompanied her and her bodyguard to the car. “Will they settle?”
“Yes,” Leisha said. “I think so. You have an interesting set of colleagues, Doctor.”
He eyed her warily.
“Your director forgets he runs a publicly-traded company, your firm’s lawyer can’t put together a decent class-six employee contract, and your assistant in Sleepless genetic research is riding away on a We-Sleep scooter.”
Walcott airily waved his hand. “He’s young. Can’t afford a car. And of course, if this research goes through, there won’t be any We-Sleep Movement. Nobody will have to sleep.”
“Except those who can’t afford the operation. Or a car.”
Walcott regarded her with amusement. “Shouldn’t you be arguing the other side, Ms. Camden? In favor of the economic elite? After all, very few people can afford to genetically alter their in vitro embryos for sleeplessness.”
“I was not arguing, Dr. Walcott. Merely correcting your false statement.” In a subtler way, he was just as unlikable as Lee.
Walcott waved his hand. “Ah, well, I suppose you can’t help it. Once a lawyer…”
She slammed the car door hard enough that her bodyguard jumped.
SHE WAS LATE FOR COURT. The judge was looking around irritably. “Ms. Camden?”
“I’m sorry, Your Honor. I was unavoidably detained.”
“Avoid it, Counselor.”
“Yes, Your Honor.” The courtroom was nearly empty, despite the importance of the case to Constitutional law. Fish-migration patterns did not rivet the newsgrids. In addition to the opposing parties and their counsel, she saw one reporter, state and federal environmental officials, three youngsters she guessed to be either law or ecology students, one ex-judge, and three witnesses.
And Richard Keller, who was not due to testify as her expert witness until tomorrow.
He sat in the back of the room, as upright as if on brainies, a thick-set man surrounded by four bodyguards. That must be what happened when you lived year in and year out in Sanctuary; the rest of the world looked even more dangerous than it was. Richard caught her eye. He didn’t smile. Something in Leisha’s chest turned cold.
“If you’re finally ready to start, Counselor…”
“Yes, Your Honor. We are. I call Carl Tremolia to the stand.”
Tremolia, a burly fisherman who was a hostile witness, stalked up the aisle. Leisha’s client’s eyes narrowed. Tremolia wore a We-Sleep electronic pin on his lapel. There was a disturbance by the door; someone was talking to the bailiff in an insistent undertone.
“Your Honor, I petition the court to order the witness to remove his lapel pin,” Leisha said. “Given the circumstances of the case, political opinions of the witness, whether expressed by words or jewelry, are prejudicial.”
The judge said, “Remove the pin.”
The fisherman tore if off his jacket. “You can make me take off the pin but you can’t make me buy Sleepless!”
“Strike that,” the judge said. “Mr. Tremolia, if you do not answer only when spoken to I will charge you with contempt…What is it, Bailiff?”
“Sorry, Your Honor. Message for Ms. Camden. Personal and urgent.”
He handed Leisha a slip of hard-copy. Call Kevin Baker at office immediately. Urgent and personal. “Your Honor…”
The judge sighed. “Go, go.”
In the corridor she pulled a comlink from her briefcase. Kevin’s face appeared on the miniature screen.
“Leisha. About Walcott—”
“This is an unshielded link, Kevin—”
“I know. It doesn’t matter, this is in the public record. Hell, in a few hours the whole fucking world will know. Walcott can’t file for those patents.”
“Why not? Samplice—”
“Forget Samplice. The patents were filed two months ago. Neat, clean, unbreakable. In the name of Sanctuary, Incorporated…Leisha?”
“I’m here,” she said numbly. Kevin had always told her that nobody could falsify the government’s patent files. There were too many backups, electronic and hard-copy and free-standing off-line. Nobody.
Kevin said, “There’s more. Leisha…Timothy Herlinger is dead.”
“Dead! I saw him not a half-hour ago! Riding away on a scooter!”
“He was hit by a car. The deflection shields on his scooter failed. A cop happened to come by a few minutes later, put it right on the Med-Net, and of course I have all nets monitored to flag key names.”
She said unsteadily, “Who hit him?”
“A woman named Stacy Hillman, gave her address as Barrington. I have wizards checking her now. But it looks like an accident.”
“Scooter deflector shields are Y-energy cones. They don’t fail; it’s one of their main marketing points. They just don’t. Not even on a shoddy We-Sleep scooter.”
Kevin whistled. “He was riding a We-Sleep scooter?”
Leisha closed her eyes. “
Kevin, send two bodyguards to find Walcott. The best bodyguards you can hire. No—your own. He was at Samplice a half-hour ago. Have him escorted to our apartment. Or would your office be safer?”
“My office.”
“I can’t leave court until two at the earliest. And I can’t ask for a recess. Not again.” She had already used recesses in this case to go to Mississippi and to Sanctuary. To Sanctuary twice.
Kevin said, “Just go ahead with your case. I’ll keep Walcott safe.”
Leisha opened her eyes. From the courtroom door the bailiff watched her. She had always liked that bailiff, a gentle old man who liked to show her too-expensive holos of his grandchildren. At the other end of the corridor stood Richard Keller, back preternaturally straight, waiting. For her. He knew what Kevin’s call was about, and now he stood waiting. She knew it, as certainly as she knew her own name.
How had he known what Kevin was about to tell her?
She went back to court to ask the judge for a recess.
LEISHA LED RICHARD TO HER OFFICE A BLOCK AWAY, not touching him as they walked, not looking at him. Inside, she opaqued the window all the way to black. The exotics, passion flowers and ginger and flame orchids, began to close.
She said quietly, “Tell me.”
Richard gazed at the closing flowers. “Your father grew those.”
She knew that tone of voice; she had heard it in police interrogation rooms, in jails, in court: the voice of a man who will say anything that comes into his head, anything at all, because he has already lost everything. The tone carried a certain amount of freedom, of a kind that always made Leisha want to look away.
She didn’t look away now. “Tell me, Richard.”
“Sanctuary stole Walcott’s research papers. There’s a network, Inside wizards and Outside Sleeper underworld, very complex. Jennifer’s been building it for years. They did it all: Samplice, First National Bank.”
This was nothing new. Richard had told her as much in Sanctuary, in Jennifer’s presence. “I have to say something, Richard. Listen carefully. You’re talking to Walcott’s counsel, and nothing you say here is off the record. Nothing. Marital privilege of confidentiality won’t apply to anything Jennifer said to you in front of a third party or parties, such as the Sanctuary Council—Article 861 of United States Code. You can be required to repeat what you say here under oath. Do you understand?”
